


It’s the Little Things (An Assortment of facts about Harry Lockhart and Perry van Shrike)

by orphan_account



Category: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-05
Updated: 2012-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-02 12:57:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1057034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the little things about a person that sets them apart from everyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It’s the Little Things (An Assortment of facts about Harry Lockhart and Perry van Shrike)

1\. Harry was raised with religion, and even — in his own way — still believes in God. He doesn’t talk about things like fate and destiny lightly, which is why it always hurts so much every time Harmony breaks up with him again.

2\. Perry spent much of his childhood convinced that if there was actually a God, he was a heartless son of a bitch. For as long as he can remember, it was always just him and his mother, with the occasional and sporadic visits from a father that didn’t care. Now, as an adult, God is just any other swear. He absolutely refuses to believe in a higher power that will allow children to grow up miserable.

3\. Despite the jokes, Harry’s family were always fairly painfully normal. Harry is the youngest of three, and he got on with Charles and Margaret about as well as siblings can be expected to get on. Their parents were fairly typical parents, and had a fairly typical amount of quarrels. So, when Charlie went off to become a police officer and Maggie became a school teacher, no-one could come up with a suitable reason for Harry to have quit school and get into crime like he did.

4\. Perry was never a cop, unlike most of the people who get into his line of work. He was never in the military, and he only ever took one security job. The security job he did take was as a bouncer at the Domino Room, which was how he met Harmony Lane. He got into the private detective business after finding himself suddenly unemployed when ownership of the Domino Room changed, and the new guy brought in his own security. Perry knew a guy who knew a guy who was looking to take on an apprentice as a way of expanding his business. It didn’t pay well and a lot of it was office work until Perry was able to gather enough experience hours to start the process of handling cases. After that, he couldn’t see himself doing anything else with his life.

5\. Harry has held several legitimate jobs in his adult life, all but two of them because his parole terms dictated that he had to maintain steady employment. And while he has been guilty of violating his parole, it was never actually because he failed to maintain the required steady employment. If you put him to a task, he’ll set out to complete it, no matter how boring or menial the task may be. The area in which he excels the most is manual labour, and his two favourite jobs were both in warehouses. In general, the less he has to think about the task given to him, the easier he finds the work.

6\. For someone who’s lived in LA for as long as he has, Perry’s Spanish is abysmal at best. He can order lunch from a Mexican restaurant and tell someone to fuck off, and that effectively exhausts his foreign language skills. By this point, not knowing any other Spanish has almost become something of a point of pride for him, and he often likes to joke that he’s the only guy in California who isn’t bilingual.

7\. Much to everyone’s surprise, Harry is fluent in Spanish and passable in French. He took the latter in school because he thought it might come in useful if he ever went to Canada, and he picked up the former whilst living in New York, working alongside a sizable number of Puerto Ricans. He has just the right amount of cockiness and a certain disregard for how foolish he sounds when he gets the syntax wrong that lets him just barrel ahead as though suddenly speaking another language is the most natural thing in the world.

8\. Perry does have one hidden ace up his sleeve that often comes in handy when dealing with suspects that don’t want to speak English. Perry can tell, unfailingly, when someone is fucking with him. Every now and then, he does come across the occasional guy or gal who legitimately doesn’t speak English and has to either find a new lead or try to get the person to stick around long enough to find an interpreter, which isn’t easy when they don’t know why Perry wants them to stick around in the first place. Anymore, he doesn’t have this problem, though. If he even thinks he’s going to need to know a bit of Spanish, he brings Harry along under the pretence that he’s somehow doing Harry a favour.

9\. Contrary to common expectations, Harry is fastidiously tidy. What he lacks in personal grooming, he makes up for in other areas. He likes to know exactly where everything is, and needless clutter makes him anxious.

10\. Perry thought that letting Harry stay with him would be an exercise in constantly picking up after a small tornado and trying to train the small tornado into picking up after itself. After Harry moved in with Harmony, it took Perry three days to realise why the volume of dirty dishes had gone _up_ ; Harry was no longer around to make sure they got done.

11\. Harry is still annoying to live with, though. Just because he’s tidy doesn’t mean he isn’t lazy and constantly in the way. There are days where he’ll barely move from the sofa, spending the entire time staring at the television and devouring several bags of chips. Unless he knows he has to go somewhere, he tends to get no more dressed than just a vest and boxers. And despite this, somehow his shoes (all six pairs of them — four pairs of trainers, a pair of boots, and a pair of canvas loafers, and none purchased legitimately) always manage to find their way to being right in front of the door.

12\. Perry has tried to teach Harry how to dress himself. He’s taken him to the high-end shops, bought all the expensive labels and even had the jackets and trousers altered so they didn’t look quite so off-the-rack. But somehow, as soon as Harry puts them on, they all look like they came out of a bargain bin at Goodwill. This in and of itself comprises part of the reason why Perry doesn’t like taking Harry on cases.

13\. Harry couldn’t tell you why nothing ever looks good on him. As far as he knows, he’s not wearing anything incorrectly, and it’s not like he spills chocolate sauce down his front two minutes after getting dressed. He’s even tried several different hair cuts and styles to see if that might make a difference but it never does. As far as he’s concerned, he’s just cursed to forever looking like he just slept in a bus shelter.

14\. Perry owns a female Persian cat, which he simply calls Cat. He got it from a client, and only keeps it around so he doesn’t feel like he’s talking to himself whenever he needs to soundboard details for a case. Once Harry started hanging around through, Perry did have to admit that he’d formed something of an attachment to the furry little demon, despite it becoming effectively useless. Now he keeps it around because he likes watching it find new ways to annoy Harry.

15\. Harry hates Perry’s cat. Every time he brings his bag over, no matter what he has in it, the cat finds it and pukes or pisses all over it. He learned very quickly to make sure it stays zipped shut, and it only took the cat puking _in >_ it once for him to get into that habit.

  



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